Tata Power Delhi Distribution

Operating during a global pandemic

The company’s digital journey was well underway when COVID-19 struck, which ensured that Tata Power was well-positioned to meet the challenge of keeping essential operations running. The company’s 10,000 employees worked day and night to provide uninterrupted power to customers, including hospitals and laboratories on the frontlines of the crisis.

As more than 70% of staff began working remotely, Tata Power’s IT team stepped up to enable secure remote desktop access and solutions. Samanta observed that the timing of Tata Power Delhi’s digital initiatives was fortunate: “We deployed a lot of digital technologies and work processes late last year, which actually came as a boon during the pandemic.”

A key application in maintaining productivity remotely and keeping business moving forward was OpenText™ Documentum™, an enterprise content management solution that the company had recently deployed. Samanta explained that OpenText Documentum xCP, a content management framework for developers to rapidly design and deploy information-centric business processes, helped combine content with process and automation to streamline workflows for greater remote productivity: “In this pandemic situation, we have developed a lot of innovative work processes using OpenText Documentum xCP to solve the problems we are facing.”

For example, when the pandemic struck, the utility needed to collaborate with government functionary suppliers and even the judiciary. “OpenText Documentum helped during the COVID-19 situation. We needed to establish communication with authorities like the state government functionaries, so we created work processes based on OpenText Documentum platform. We gave access to many people within the organization and outside the organization on the Internet,” noted Samanta. “As a result, we have been able to be resilient during this pandemic but also comply with the need to stay at home.”

Connecting customers to content remotely

One of the many business challenges that Tata Power Delhi faced during the lockdown was the need to send bills to customers and collect payment. To ensure continuous and uninterrupted power to every home, hospital, laboratory, and essential service provider, Tata Power needed customers to pay their bills on time. The company and its customers needed to adopt electronic processes and digital payment options to accommodate the new reality. “Using OpenText Documentum platform to deliver the content, which we had integrated with other applications, we were able to give customers self-service options through the web, SMS, WhatsApp, Paytm, and many other ways so they could click and pay,” explained Samanta.

The result was a dramatic and lasting increase in electronic payments via mobile channels. Samanta reported, “Digital payments increased by ten times—a few thousand to more than one million. On Paytm, it was a 374% increase during the pandemic and our digital payments went up from 61% to close to 96%. When the lockdown was lifted in June, digital payments only came down to 89%. That is what I loved most.”

Maintaining customer care levels also became problematic when call center staffing was decimated during the lockdown. Digital channels became critical, said Samanta: “When the virus infection happened, suddenly the capacity of our call centers dropped to a fraction of the usual. Then it was a panic situation, ‘How do we serve the customer without the call center?’ We had to create an application for employees, which was provided on laptops and tablets with a 4G connection. At the same time, we created online self-service channels to manage customer complaints, for example.”

Digital advances deliver a silver lining

The changes triggered by the pandemic to digitize customer- and employee-related services have become the new normal at Tata, thus building a stronger foundation for further digital transformation. Samanta summarized, “Using OpenText Documentum to bypass business processes where human intervention was high has helped us reduce our costs as well as increase operational efficiency. We are saving money and time, and our customers are happy because they also want to reduce interactions.”